Hairdos and don'ts: Hair symbolism and sexual history in Samoa

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

In Samoa all fair hair is considered ena ena, a word that is usually translated as brown, although when English-speaking Samoans use this term in reference to hair, they typically gloss it as "blond." This makes sense since, when one is bleaching Polynesian hair, it goes through a series of reddish-brown shades prior to arriving at blond, and even then it retains a reddish hue. When describing hair, Samoans specify the actual shade of "blond" by using certain modifiers with 'ena'ena, such as ena ena munaia, which literally means "really nice brown hair," but which refers to a very fair reddish color.

The hair of female spirits is most commonly said to be 'ena'ena m anaia, and they are wont to decorate it with a red hibiscus. 35 Samoans look upon the

fair reddish hair ascribed to female spirits as a mark of aristocratic blood, and it occurs naturally in a few Samoans. So signal a mark of status was this reddish hair in old Samoa that the principle ornament of the highest status persons on ceremonial occasions was a headdress composed of it. The headdress was called a tuiga and was a ritualized version of the tutagita. Its central element was tufts of human hair that the nineteenth-century German medic Kraemer says were those of a girl, cut off and bleached with sunlight, lime, and wild oranges over a period from six months to a year. 36

Red coloration was a hallmark of mana not only when it appeared on skin and hair but on objects as well, for example on fine mats. Supernatural powers were ascribed to certain fine mats, and they were thought to be the resting place

of spirits.37 Fine mats are decorated with feathers, which in old Samoa were often red feathers taken from a scarlet-headed parakeet called sega.38 The female spirit, LeTelesa, said to have red hair, may take the form of a sega. Thus Samoan iconography equates red hair and red feathers, and both appear as exudations of mana. The sega itself is said to have been born as a "clot of blood," the Samoan euphemism for miscarriages. 39 In general, aitu (spirits) may originate as miscarriages. By implication the sega is a kind of aitu, and the "clot of blood" origins of sega and aitu emphasize their innate redness.

If the tutagita--both in its substance and its color--represented mana and sexuality--fecundity, then the girls' bleached locks would have been a kind of self-flaunting--advertising their potential sexuality and subsequent fecundity. 40 Indeed, the tutagita epitomizes a general attitude towards girls' bodies in old Samoa, namely that these bodies should be displayed. This attitude is rife throughout early missionary portraits.

The Rev. Williams recounts how Samoan girls, when counseled by missionary wives to conceal their persons, responded by counseling missionary wives. The girls told the wives to put aside their missionary garments and to tie a shaggy mat around their waists such that their left thighs were bare, to rub

their skins with oils, to powder their breasts with turmeric, to adorn themselves with beads, "& then . . . walk about to shew themselves" (fa alialia), so that they might inspire longing in the manaia, the sons of chiefs.41 Williams cites another instance in which a company of Samoan women and girls tease a bashful young Englishman by dancing before him naked, all the while telling him not to mind because "it was FaaSamoa . . . or the Samoan fashion." 42